LinkedIn Guide
LinkedIn Guide is a Villanova Career Center resource that helps students build a complete and professional LinkedIn profile. The guide provides a checklist of important profile sections and explains how each section can be used to show a student’s experience, skills, interests, accomplishments, and career goals.
Students can use this guide to strengthen their LinkedIn presence, make their profile easier to share with employers and professional contacts, and better communicate their personal brand.
This guide covers key LinkedIn profile sections such as:
- Profile Photo: Use a friendly and approachable photo. This can be a professional headshot, a quality photo taken with a phone, or a photo from the Career Center’s headshot photobooth.
- Headline: Write an engaging headline that reflects your personal brand, summarizes your goals or interests, and encourages readers to explore your profile.
- About/Summary: Describe your motivation, skills, accomplishments, goals, and career direction in a professional but personal voice.
- Experience: Include work experiences, internships, part-time jobs, major projects, and other relevant experiences. Descriptions should explain duties, skills, and accomplishments.
- Organizations: Add clubs and organizations, along with position titles and descriptions of responsibilities or contributions.
- Education: Include education history, degrees, dates, honors, study abroad experiences, and other educational programs.
- Volunteer Experience and Causes: Add volunteer roles or causes that connect to your interests, major, industry, or personal brand.
- Skills and Endorsements: List important skills so connections can endorse you for your strengths.
- Courses: Add relevant courses with full titles and dates to show your specific knowledge base.
- Projects: Include academic, professional, or personal projects and describe what you did and how you did it.
- Honors and Awards: Add prizes, awards, or recognitions earned in or outside of school.
- Recommendations: Ask managers, supervisors, professors, or classmates who know your work well to write recommendations.
- Interests: Follow companies, thought leaders, and groups that relate to your career goals and industry focus.
- Connections: Build a strong network of quality connections, including peers, relatives, teammates, neighbors, professors, supervisors, colleagues, coaches, clergy, and Villanova alumni.
The guide also reminds students to customize their public profile URL and adjust profile visibility settings so their LinkedIn profile is easier to share with their network.
